Hyunjung Noh — Pleased to Eat You

How can communication design make a positive contribution to experiences of cultural difference through food?

With rapid globalisation, it has become commonplace to encounter people from different cultures and backgrounds in everyday life. Cultural melting-pots such as London are especially demonstrative of these meeting; this was a new experience for me upon my arrival from South Korea in 2009. However, while communities are richly mixed and diverse, certain presumptions and prejudices persist. Moreover, anti-multiculturalism sentiment is growing amongst Londoners as a larger anti-immigration wave is perpetuated through the media and right-wing groups.

Yet it is the little moments that build strong communities and cohesion, and make each day special through interactions between people and the world. Helping audiences gain a small but positive understanding of this, as a communication design project, is the key theme of this work, thus it signals to design’s possibilities to bridging conflict amongst diverse groups.

Initially involving students, the project then grew to collaborating with co-workers and customers. As a result, ‘Pleased to Eat You’ is growing, continually seeking to explore the potential impact of this cross-cultural project on a broader range of people from different generations and ethnicities.